Flame - Not

[Raymond C Drouillard]

On Fri, 30 Apr 1999 22:21:36 -0400 (EDT) William T Wilson
<fluffy at snurgle.org> writes:
>On Fri, 30 Apr 1999, H Villemure wrote:
>
>> I am more of an ignoramus than most on this list- just a fresh
>> mechanical engineering graduate. Could you detail what a *flathead*
>> motor design consists of?
>
>Yeah.. the heads are flat.  ;)  Nothing in them but the plugs.
>
>During the early part of the century up through the 50's, Ford made
>flathead V8s which were extremely good engines and used in a wide
variety
>of their cars and a number of early street rods.  Not only Ford used
>flathead engines though; I've got one in a '55 Jeep, which is an inline
>6-cylinder.

I believe that they were used with the inline 4 cylinder Jeep engines,
also.

>
>There are some nice advantages to the flathead, not the least of which
is
>simplicity.  There are no timing belts, chains, or any of that muck;
it's
>all gear driven.  It is somewhat hard to get at the cams, though. 
Valves
>are in the block right by the manifolds, so even a valve job is easy. 
It
>is a very simple design.  However, the performance is lacking compared
to
>OHV or OHC type engines.
>

No worry about the valve colliding with the piston.

I imagine that if one wanted to make one today, ceramic coating could be
used to combat the disadvantage of heat loss through the odd-shaped
combustion chamber.  Also, the more modern notion of a "pinch zone"
wouldn't be too hard to impliment, and could actually take up the whole
area of the piston.

Ray


___________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html
or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]